Staff Developer Experience Engineer

About the Role

We are looking for a Staff Developer Experience Engineer to help shape how Horizon3 engineers build, test, release, and operate software.

The Developer Experience team owns the foundations connecting local development to production delivery: developer tooling, CI/CD, build systems, container base images, artifact promotion, release gates, and approved agentic-development workflows. You will define technical direction, lead complex initiatives across engineering, and build reusable paths that improve delivery speed, quality, security, and confidence.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous problems, influencing across teams, and making the software lifecycle easier to use and operate.

Developer Platform Strategy, Delivery & Operations

• Define the architecture and roadmap for local development, repository tooling, CI/CD, build systems, and release workflows.
• Lead high-impact initiatives across engineering that reduce manual coordination and standardize the path from code change to production.
• Build reusable GitLab CI/CD templates, runner capabilities, developer workflows, test gates, artifact promotion, release manifests, and rollback paths.
• Establish sustainable practices for shared container images, build performance, reproducibility, scanning, signing, provenance, and supply-chain security.
• Improve developer workflow and delivery observability through useful measures of setup time, pipeline health, release performance, and adoption.
• Partner with Platform, Security, QA, and feature teams to make delivery foundations reliable, secure, and easy to consume.

Technical Leadership & Enablement

• Establish standards and paved paths for developer workflows, build and release engineering, and approved AI-assisted development.
• Design safe agentic-development workflows that integrate with code review, testing, scanning, permissions, auditability, and Security requirements.
• Turn repeated developer friction into reusable tooling, templates, documentation, migration guidance, and runbooks.
• Mentor engineers, develop technical owners, and raise the engineering bar across Developer Experience and Horizon3.
• Communicate complex technical decisions clearly and build alignment across Platform, Application Engineering, Data Engineering, Security, QA, Product, and Program Management.
• Participate in design reviews, operational reviews, incident response, and continuous improvement.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in Developer Experience, Developer Productivity, Build/Release Engineering, Platform Engineering, SRE, DevOps, or software engineering with substantial tooling and delivery ownership.
• Deep experience designing and operating CI/CD systems, preferably GitLab CI/CD and self-hosted runners.
• Experience with container builds, Docker or OCI images, artifact repositories, and reproducible builds.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes-based development or delivery workflows.
• Experience implementing automated tests, security checks, release gates, progressive delivery, and rollback.
• Proficiency in Go and Python for automation, developer tooling, or platform services.
• Strong understanding of software supply-chain security, dependencies, image vulnerabilities, provenance, secrets, and least privilege.
• Demonstrated success leading complex initiatives across multiple teams and driving adoption of shared capabilities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• Internal developer platform, paved-road, service-template, or developer-portal experience.
• Shared language/runtime base images, image signing, SBOMs, or provenance-control experience.
• GitLab Runner fleets, CI optimization, build caching, or multi-repository release-system experience.
• Local Kubernetes, dev containers, Docker Compose, Orbstack, Skaffold, ArgoCD, or GitOps experience.
• AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflow experience.
• OpenTelemetry, Datadog, pipeline telemetry, or developer-productivity metrics experience.
• Security-sensitive, regulated, or cybersecurity experience.

Our Developer Experience Stack

• GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, and private runner fleets
• Shared CI/CD templates and pipeline management
• Docker/OCI images, artifact repositories, and shared base images
• Kubernetes, EKS, Helm, Skaffold, and ArgoCD
• AWS and cloud-native development environments
• Go, Python, TypeScript, shell scripting, and repository tooling
• OpenTelemetry, Datadog, and pipeline/deployment observability
• Approved AI coding tools, including Claude Code for approved engineering use cases

Exact tool matches are less important than strong software-engineering fundamentals, platform judgment, empathy for developers, and a track record of improving delivery systems at scale.

What Success Looks Like

• Engineering teams adopt clear, reliable paved paths from local development through production.
• Shared CI/CD, build, and release capabilities reduce friction and manual coordination.
• The same validated artifact or commit moves predictably through environments.
• Base images, build components, and delivery workflows are secure, current, traceable, and easy to consume.
• Approved AI-assisted workflows improve productivity without bypassing review, testing, or security.
• Developer Experience has clear standards, strong adoption, measurable outcomes, and multiple technical owners.
• You are trusted across Engineering to lead difficult developer-workflow and delivery decisions.

Why Join Us

You’ll shape the engineering system behind a rapidly evolving cybersecurity product used by organizations around the world. Your work will improve how every engineering team builds and operates NodeZero while establishing a new, high-leverage technical function at Horizon3.

Travel

Occasional travel may be required for company onsite meetings and team collaboration.